Pietro Aretino

Pietro Aretino (b. 1492–d. 1556) displaced the humanist Pietro Bembo, a generation his senior, as the leading man of letters in Italy during the second quarter of the century. His dominance signaled a revolution. Whereas Bembo was a skilled Latinist and advocated imitating the “pure” Italian of 14th-century Tuscany, Aretino wrote exclusively in the vernacular, evolving his own colorful, vital, and distinctive prose style. His work reveals an acute knowledge of humanist literary kinds and conventions as well as the approved fashions of Ciceronianism, Petrarchism, and Neoplatonism, often satirizing or inverting them. Aretino adopted “follow nature” as his credo and boasted that he lived by the sweat of his ink. After having begun his career as a court poet in Rome, he adapted to Venice’s flourishing printing industry, becoming highly and variously productive. Equally adept at praise and blame, Aretino was a justly feared satirist; however, his greatest success came with his enormously popular books of letters, which created a new literary vogue. His religious writings, biblical narratives and saints’ lives, also were popular and influential before Counter-Reformation repression. Aretino spearheaded the emancipation of writers from dependence on court patronage. Despite the handicaps of modest origin and lack of formal education, Aretino transcended class barriers to become the correspondent and confidant of nobility and princes, “the secretary of the world” in one of his epithets (“secretary” meaning “keeper of secrets”). Aretino befriended and cultivated many artists, particularly the painter Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) and the architect and sculptor Jacopo Sansovino; the three men came to be recognized as an informal artistic triumvirate in Venice. Aretino’s letters and sonnets have been recognized for contributing to the development of art criticism. He was the first writer to take full advantage of reproductive artistic media to enhance his status as a celebrity author whose face and personality were even better known than his books. All of this makes it possible to argue that Aretino was not the greatest but the most important Italian author of the 16th century.